Homing (34 page)

"Search me," Charlene replied. "Maybe drugs, I guess.

Or maybe some kind of new sickness. I mean, that girl Julie's been living in Los Angeles, and she could have brought all kinds of sickness up here, couldn't she?"

"I guess," Carl Henderson mused, his mind racing as he wondered if the lab in San Luis Obispo had already tested Julie's blood. If they had, and found traces of the stuff he'd given Ellen Filmore as a bee antivenom ...

He felt an almost irresistible urge to drive over to the clinic right now-this instant-and do whatever was necessary to retrieve the vial.

But he couldn't give in to the urge, because he could imagine Charlene Hopkhis telling her next customer: And you know, that Carl Henderson, he got so upset when I told him they were checking Julie's blood! Why, he took Off out of here like a bat out of hell! Then she would give that annoying little chuckle of hers and shake her head. I never did trust that man, he heard her saying. Always something strange about him And that would do it. Mark Shannon would be at his house again, but this time he wouldn't just be asking questions.

Carl's jaw tightened as he had a sudden- vision of Charlene Hopkhis hanging from the wall of his darkroom, her gossiping voice silenced forever as millions of his tiny carnivores quickly devoured her, cleaning her bones as quickly as they had that of He put the thought quickly out of his mind.

Calm.

The main thing was to stay calm and behave logically.

Feigning boredom with Charlene's continuing recitation of the morning's gossip-which, he noticed, she was embellishing even as she repeated it for him-he broke into her stream of words to order a hamburger, fries, and a chocolate malt.

As Charlene went to put his order in, his mind continued racing, and by the time the food came, he knew what to do.

He ate slowly, forcing himself to show no signs of rushing, determined that when he left, neither Charlene nor her husband, who worked as a cook behind the counter, would have any reason to comment on him later on.

Except to say that he'd seemed perfectly normal.

As he was getting ready to pay Charlene, he winced, then uttered a gasp of surprise.

Charlene glanced up from her order book. "You say something, Carl?"

Carl shook his head and put on a weak smile. "Uh-uh.

Just a little gas, I guess."

He winced again, and this time added a grunt, as if he were suppressing pain.

Charlene Hopkhis's smile faded. Her penciled eyebrows came together in a worried frown. "You sure you're all right?" she asked. Then, with a guilty glance toward the interior of the drive-in, she leaned toward the window.

"Maybe you better go over to the clinic and see Dr. F.

yourself," she said quietly. "I keep tellin' George to make sure he cooks that meat real good, but I heard about another of those Ecoli things just last week." She clucked her tongue in disapproval. "I swear, if you can't trust the meat anymore, I just don't know what to think!"

Nodding as if not trusting himself to speak, Carl Henderson gave Charlene a ten-dollar bill, waited for his change, then started the car.

Even better than he'd hoped-it had been Charlene herself who sent him to see Ellen Filmore!

As he pulled into the clinic parking lot five minutes later, the worst of his fears began to ease when he didn't see either of the town's two squad cars in the lot.

And when the anxious look on Ellen Filmore's face turned into a smile as she recognized him, Carl relaxed even more. No matter what she might have found out about Julie's blood, at least so far she hadn't put it together with the substance in the vial.

Even before he spoke, Ellen Filmore came out from behind Roberto's desk, where she'd been filling in for her nurse until he got back from San Luis Obispo. "I hear you might have gotten some bad meat," she said.

Carl feigned annoyance. "I don't believe it." harlene already called here?"

"E. coli is nothing to make light of," Ellen told him, leading him into the same examining room where she'd treated Julie Spellman the day the bees had stung her.

"And you can't blame Charlene for worrying-if they served you tainted meat, you could sue them."

"Right," Carl said, rolling his eyes. "And if I did, nobody in town would speak to me, and I sure wouldn't be able to eat anything anywhere. I think I'd rather take my chances."

"Well, I agree with Charlene," Ellen told him, handing him an examination smock. "Put this on, and call me when you're ready." She left the room, and Carl Henderson immediately checked the counter Against the far wall, which was the last place he'd seen the brown vial he'd given Ellen Filmore less than a week ago.

It wasn't there.

Quickly taking off his pants and shirt and putting the shapeless smock on over his underwear, Carl checked two of the drawers for the vial and was about to open a third when there was a sharp knock at the door.

"Are you all right?" he heard Ellen call.

"All set," Carl called back, moving hurriedly to the examining table. By the time the doctor stepped through a moment later, Carl was perched on its edge, his fingers pressed to his stomach. "Probably nothing but a little gas," he muttered as Ellen began going over him, checking his vital signs, then palpating his abdomen.

Ten minutes later she was done. "Okay," she said, picking up Carl's chart and jotting a few notes on it. "I think you can relax. If it's E. coli, it's the first case known to medical science." Opening one of the cabinets over the counter, she took out a bottle of antacid tablets, handed one of them to Carl, and winked. 'This is what I always take after one of George Hopkhis's burgers. If it doesn't work, call me. But I suspect you were a lot closer to a diagnosis than Charlene was. Come out to the waiting room when you're ready."

Ellen Filmore closed the door to the examining room as she left, leaving him alone again. Then Carl went to work again, searching through one drawer after another.

Was it possible she'd used the entire contents of the viai9

But if she had, why hadn't she called him, demanding more? After all, despite what he'd intended the contents of the vial to do, it had apparently proved as effective as the real antivenom. In fact, Carl still had no idea why the contents of the vial hadn't killed Julie, but he knew that it had done something. And if they found traces of it in her blood Quickly, Carl opened the last drawer, and was about to close it again when he spotted the tiny brown bottle.

Snatching it up, he replaced it with the vial of the real antivenom that he'd transferred from his briefcase to his pants pocket on his way to the clinic from the A&W drive-in.

Less than five minutes after Ellen Filmore had left him to put his clothes back on, Carl Henderson was back in the waiting room.

"Feeling any better?" the doctor asked, glancing up from the medical journal she was reading.

Carl smiled broadly. "I'm fine," he said, unknowingly repeating the same words Julie, Jeff, and Andy had all uttered over the last few days. "I'm just fine."

But unlike the other three, Carl Henderson meant what he said.

Kevin Owen slowed his car to a stop at the bottom of the road leading up into the park. His head was throbbing and the terrible itching sensation that had spread all through his body was getting worse by the moment.

He was almost sure he was going crazy, for the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that what he'd seen in the cave that morning couldn't possibly have been real.

But if it wasn't real, where had the image that was so vivid in his head come from?

Once again, as he'd been trying to do all day, he struggled to remember exactly what had happened up there.

Jeff had been acting strange f that Kevin was absolutely certain.

That he'd barely spoken as they hiked up into the hills was weird enough, given how much Jeff usually had to say. But the way he'd just kept walking, like he'd known where he was going all the time, was almost eerie.

Was it possible that he'd been up there before? Could he have gone with Julie when she went, and then come back down?

How come, Kevin wondered, he hadn't been able to tell his father and Karen what had happened up there?

In fact, ever since that horrible thing had happened, when what had looked like a black cloud of gnats had swarmed up out of Jeff's throat-he'd felt like something foreign was inside him.

Sort of like those movies he'd seen where space aliens came down and got inside human bodies, taking them over so they -could pass themselves off as human.

But it wasn't quite like that, either, because in those movies, the aliens always lolled the real person and just used their bodies.

And he was still alive-he knew he was still alive Yet he still had that odd sense of something else being inside his body, and he knew that something had happened to him, because he couldn't say what he meant anymore.

In fact, he couldn't even act like he wanted to!

He'd worked in the barn with his father, even though he felt so bad he kept g he might collapse at any minute. And when his father had asked him how he was, he kept going on about feeling fine, even though he'd been ready to puke the whole time.

Once, he even tried to vomit, figuring that if he did, at least his father would figure out that something was wrong with him.

But he couldn't even throw up!

An hour ago he'd felt an urge to go back up into the hills. Twice, as he drove around town looking for Sara and Shelley, he found himself turning onto one of the streets that led toward the hills, but both times he'd managed to make himself turn back, determined that whatever happened, he wasn't going to go back up to that cave!

Then, suddenly, he'd gotten hungry.

It wasn't the kind of hunger he was used to, where he slowly began to feel like it would be nice to have something to eat.

No, this was something else-a ravening sense of starvation that made him feel that if he didn't eat right away, he'd die.

That was when he'd gone to the A&W, where he ordered twice as much food as he'd ever eaten before.

And while he'd eaten, he listened to Charlene go on and on about all the weird things that were happening that morning.

When she finally got around to telling him about Andy Bennett taking off up into the hills, Kevin knew right away where he'd gone-it had to be the cave!

He started to wonder, then, if maybe he was going crazy, or if maybe even a spaceship really had landed, and he and the rest of the kids were being taken over by aliens, like in those movies.

But that was stupid! There weren't any such things as spaceships or aliens!

Then what was happening to him?

After he finished the third hamburger at the A&W, he'd gone over to the grocery store where Sara's mother was a cashier. Mrs. McLaughlin had seen right away that something was wrong with him, but he insisted he was fine and just wanted to find Sara and Shelley.

"They're up in the park, I think," Mrs. McLaughlin told him. "Sara said something about them taking Shelley's sister and her friends for a picnic." Then, as she examined Kevin's sweating face, her tone had changed. "But I think you ought to go over and see Dr. Filmore," she said. "You look sick, and I don't want you going up to the park and spreading it all over the place. Okay?"

Kevin nodded, but when he got back to the car, he'd known he wasn't going to the clinic.

He headed straight for the park.

Now that he was here, he felt worse than ever.

A terrible humming was starting in his head, and he suddenly remembered the other night, when they'd all gone to the movies together and then come up to the park.

The night Julie had first started acting weird.

And she hadn't wanted to go anywhere near the power lines.

Now, as the throbbing in his head grew worse, he understood why.

He sat in his car for a few minutes, trying to clear his mind enough to figure out what to do.

I The urge to turn away from the power lines was growing stronger, but he wouldn't give in to it.

Not until he'd talked to Sara and Shelley and found out if they were all right.

And warned them what was happening to everyone who had gone to the movies that night.

If he could.

Steeling himself Against the terrible buzzing in his head, and battling the almost overpowering urge to turn the car around and drive away, he put the transmission in gear and started forward.

The power lines were almost directly over his head here-much closer than on the road that led out to the farm-and the buzzing in his head rose to the level of a power saw screaming its way through a piece of plywood.

Gritting his teeth, Kevin forced his right foot Against the accelerator and the old Chevy surged ahead, gaining speed until he came to the crest of the hill and the parking lot.

The instant he came into the lot, he swerved away from the high-voltage wires. As soon as he did, the howling screech inside his head began to ease. The lot was almost empty, and he drove all the way to the far end, finally turning into a spot near the swings.

Shelley Munson's sister was on one of the swings, and behind her was Sara McLaughlin, pushing the swing higher and higher as the little girl screamed happily. Kevin sat behind the wheel of the car, watching the little girl while he waited for the terrible throbbing in his head to case.

A minute or two later Sara caught sight of him, waved, then came over to the car, her smile fading as she got a closer look at his face.

"Kevin? Are you okay?"

Kevin started to shake his head, but found himself nodding instead. "I'm fine," he heard himself say.

But it wasn't what he had intended to say at all! If he couldn't even tell her how he felt "I feel-" he began again, but the rest of the words the ones about the fever, the itching, and the terrible nausea in his throat, choked off by the force that seemed to have invaded not only his body, but his mind as well. "Jeff's gone," he managed to say.

Sara frowned uncertainly. "Gone? What do you mean?"

Kevin formulated the words carefully in his mind.